Movie 146: The African Queen

World War I breaks out and the Germans round up natives in African, burning their villages to prevent them going home. A brother and sister missionary team are caught in the middle and the brother dies of a head injury. When river boat captain Charlie (Bogart) returns to check on them he finds Rose (Katharine Hepburn) alone and takes her off on his boat, The African Queen. She convinces him that they have to do their patriotic duty and head down river to take out a German steamer that is blocking the way for the British Navy, a journey fraught with peril.

Warning, mild peril. Some of it is major peril I suppose. Unfortunately the age of the film means clunky special effects for the rapids sequences, with back projection, a couple of grips shaking the boat set and chucking buckets of water at the actors.

Its not a bad film, but its far from my favourite with Bogie in it. The problem is mainly that there isn’t any tension between the leads for much of the movie. Bogie is at his best as a smart mouth smooth character, for me anyway, but he cleans up too early on and from that point the chemistry didn’t really strike me. Ironically this is where he got an Oscar, so what do I know?

And nothing against Hepburn but she’s pretty one note through this thing, well one note at a time anyway.

Because of this the film fell a bit flat for me. It hinges on whether you like the chemistry between the leads, and I wasn’t all that sold on it.

I am cheating a little bit with this as I’ve “seen” the film before. With my ears. In 1952, the film is from 51, the Lux Radio Theatre did a version of this and I have heard that version. The special effects problems obviously don’t factor in here, and the story is more or less the same. You can hear that in this episode of the fantastic OTR Swagcast by my buddy Bill Hollweg:

http://brokensea.com/otr/2010/02/04/otr-swagcast-episode-49-2/

And if you go to the main show page there’s more Bogart audio coming out with episode of Bold Venture, which team him up with Lauren Bacall. And you can get more Bold Venture at Misfits audio as well:

http://misfitsaudio.com/serialclassicradio.php

Next up: Terminator – Salvation